AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.

That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.

People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.

I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.

Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh

A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.

But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.

It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.

The only ones that aren't horrible manage that because they're so bland there's nothing to go wrong. Look at an example with some detail, the "Now please make one in the style of a 90s drum n bass gig flyer, with early 3D/fractal computer imagery" poster.

At the top of the page we have a deformed wireframe sphere. A wireframe sphere is stylistically appropriate, but the incorrect rendering is not. The "CGI" aesthetic requires obviously computer generated lines, which in the 90s meant accurate and regular lines.

Next we have a messed-up stellated polyhedron, and a messed-up dot pattern. These also fail for the same reason. The main 3D rendering is also obviously broken, as are many other small details.

But the biggest failure is the complete misunderstanding of the culture. 90s DnB was absolutely not about "good vibes". The smiley face logo is completely inappropriate; that's associated with late 80s/early 90s rave culture, pre-DnB era. 90s DnB was much darker and edgier in tone. The scene was almost exclusively male, and it maintained a aggressive vibe carried over from jungle.

A 90s DnB event would never advertise "bringing communities together". Audiences would be repelled by such messaging. This is despite it actually doing just that, as the scene was racially integrated in a way that mainstream music at the time was not. If there's going to be pro-social messaging on the poster it has to be there only implicitly.

Ach, idk. On average people have horrible design aesthetics, yet are now so arrogant about it, because they imagine their a newly found ability to spot design generated with AI equates to them being able to spot bad design.

No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste. It's the equivalent of being able to tell something is photoshopped because somebody used a default brush poorly, or masked something poorly and then confounding using Photoshop with using Photoshop poorly.

You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.

One thing I've noticed with AI posters is that they're all "flat" in terms of attention. For whatever reason, they result in a post where every part is on the same level visually, and your eye does not get drawn to anything. You can't immediately see what is and isn't important.

The bad posters are absolute disasters in this regard. (And completely irredeemable in general! They are not "OK" in any way.)

But the better-stylized examples in the article aren't much better! Most of them have the same tendency. Only the minimalist Japanese and 40s Cubist styles do much better, and even those aren't structured amazingly. If you tried to add more information, I bet even the minimalist styles would become a flat and confusing.

This is the same problem I have with stock Claude prose and code. It's verbose, sure, but worse is that there's no quick way to tell what is and isn't important. In good code, you can understand the shape of the code at a glance; AI code is pretty much the opposite of that. And so are AI posters.

I work in a copy-print center where we take orders for business card, posters, flyers, invitations, and all sorts like that. Lately, I have been getting more and more AI generated artwork for these flyers and business cards, and they are not sized correctly. I can tell it's AI generated not from style, layout, or even hallucinations, but just the size. The background are a full color, the customer insists that it's the right size, but I have to tell them that if I print what they gave me, there is going to be large white borders on the sides, tops, or all around. I have had to explain to too many customers that AI doesn't know what an inch really is, as the reference images it has are different sizes. AI flyers could be the best design ever, but it will never be sized properly and will still piss off the print employee.

And I have found that if you are paying for an AI service to get these generic, wrong sized designs, you could have spent just as much going on Fiverr and gotten something that doesn't need to get a full style revision.

The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.

>The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.

This is one of the better statements of the issue right here. I think because people dislike the actors and economics surrounding AI they also feel a need to categorically reject any of it's products, but it's not necessarily bad in the sense of poor aesthetic taste as it is bad in it's lack of a appreciating that being novel as a style matters almost as much as the actual style and direct repetition teaches us not to like the style itself.

At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.

We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".

I think this is an unfair comparison. The "better" AI-generated posters in the article are all much more minimalist.

Minimalist designs have much less opportunity to insert "personality", be it that of a designer or that of an AI. No wonder they look less AI-generated, and when they do it is because some "AI-baroque" slipped through. Fancy unicode characters no human would think of are the salient one in OPs examples.

It'd be much fairer to compare AI and human for the same desired style, and yes a lot of AI-generated stuff is immediately recognizable because no one bothered to tell the AI about the desired style.

But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).

I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen.

The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.

Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.

The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.

I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.

The original posters were better than any of the mockups.

Not because they looked good, but because they used a design language that "at-a-glance" said what the event was. Sure, the designers republic/etc looked less commonplace, but if I was looking for a fun local faire I would absolutely never notice those posters and if I went i'd assume it was a completely different type of event than it is (e.g. some sort of modern art faire).

Every one of those posters didn't fit the medium idea at all (local faire event) except the child's drawing one could maybe pass.

In fact I can almost guarantee that all the posters in this article would perform worse than the originals if you were to test them on the street or in a facebook group.

If you are an actual production/commercial designer, your first goal is to understand what the clientele wants and converts, secondarily make it beautiful.

This failed both, zero understanding of the purpose of commercial art (to speak to the actual clientele and bring in more people) and ugly within their own design language (but yes, less common).

Would have been interesting to try and make designs that actually make sense for this product AND are a bit less generic.

Buried at the end of the article the author linked a library of different art styles applied to the same poster content. Found some new cool art styles to try out in the future. https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/

What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.

I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.

Generative AI is actually pretty good at giving you rough concept sketches and iterating on top of existing renders.

However, you must retain control over the scene graph and its composition. Use the output of the AI to guide how you work it. Do not assume the AI system has the ability to simulate world space with any meaningful fidelity. You can move transforms around in Blender and Unity with floating point bit increment/decrement operations if you wish. LLMs will never have this level of control.

Lighting systems are an entire universe of reasons you should do it the hard way too. Being able to iterate light placement and intensity with nanometric precision starts out looking like a brick wall, but it turns into a superpower once your scene is halfway decent.

I can usually tell when someone used AI to do things like generate steam store art because their camera doesn't change in a physically plausible way between the horizontal and vertical layouts. When you have access to the raw scene you can place the same camera in multiple orientations without altering any other aspect of the scene. The header capsule and vertical capsule are very difficult to make look coherent if you are using an LLM to generate these assets. Your best bet with AI art is to render something so big that it can be cropped for both, which is also quite obvious and ugly. Being able to instrument a scene as if it were a real place is way more productive than an LLM once the scene is ~done.

Everyone's sick of seeing the same default ChatGPT style on posters for everything from village fetes to coffee shops to school plays.

But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.

As somebody who made a poster for an event just few days ago... I find it funny that this probably took just as long as without AI while probably going through a less rewarding process with little control and very limited learning.

A non professional design would probably take few hours doing it the very first time, discovering the software to do it, maybe learn some shortcuts, few key principles e.g. using a background then putting things above, etc. The next time though they would probably take 30min with a better result, the time after that maybe 5min with complete control.

It's really not such a demanding process if you rely on existing building block, namely dedicated software, assets like imagine banks, fonts, etc.

There's a similar problem with AI-generated video, but it's in the time dimension. There's a huge genre of Asian vertical dramas, and now about 17,000 a day are being cranked out by AI systems. But there are maybe ten major plots. "Lost daughter of rich family comes home" appears over and over. There are longer videos where the plot gets lost. I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.

This probably comes from a lack of intermediate level structure. To make a good dramatic story, you usually start from a plot summary, add character sheets, develop a plot, then a storyboard, then detail the storyboard. That way, you end up at the desired end. If you just let LLM-based systems free run, they go on forever, which is real life but bad entertainment. Unless the goal is a soap opera.

There's good stuff out there, from people who can plot.

The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.

I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?

Leaving aside the quality of the different posters here, I think the interesting question is where did the default AI generated style come from? It's certainly not one of the styles listed if you interrogate chatgpt, it's not something it seems to be choosing to do.

I think the signature noisy, crowded, HDR-y look shows these posters are being spat right out of a diffusion model. They always have an image background with the classic light halos around text.

When I one-shot a poster out of Gemini or whatever, I can't make anything nearly as bad as the ones I see every day. What on earth are people even using to make stuff that bad?

The thing about the icons next to each phrase is that they are useless. Forget how they look, instead ask why they are there? Icons in UX design give a visual representation of what a button does, to help people understand the interaction with the UI. Well, these are posters. There are no buttons. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why an icon exists in the first place. (And yes, this is true for many of the places where AI throws in icons.)

That is why, even if the look of a poster is OK, they are failures. Because they forget that the reason these advertising posters exist is to communicate something that is going on. A nice look to them is a bonus, not the core purpose. So claiming that AI isn't doing a horrible job is because the author is misunderstanding what the job is in the first place.

I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.

Removing as many possible steps to a craft makes it far less personal. Disconnecting the human from the end product.

I would never attend an event with an entirely generated poster becuase that tells me you didn't care enough, and that attitude is probably permeating into the rest of the event.

Similarly, back before these models existed, I'd never attend an event with an overly stuffed "marketing" feel to it. It's the same crap just with a different tool attached to it.

I'd rather attend an event with a poster made of stock clip art, but a human decided the composition, and added doodles in between because that at least gives me the impression that SOMEONE is caring about the event.

Basically, it feels detached from the actual point of an event: community.

I went to our state fair recently, and there were so many advertisements for their food that was AI generated, and I suppose if the food looked anything like what was depicted maybe I wouldn't have had a problem, but I felt "tricked" into buying something that appeared good, and turns out, looked nothing like what it was. I overpaid, and didn't even end up eating 1/4 of it. I'm not sure if this quite falls in the same vein as the og post, but it definitely made me feel that way.

I should be fair (no pun intended) there was one booth that had mini donuts that I felt were better than the AI generated poster advertisement, but the rest of the food I ate, was certainly not.

This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.

This is not about AI. This is about human taste. AI generated the posters. But then a human looked at it and said “this looks great, I’ll take it”.

The same person would have taken the same design from a “designer” if they could afford it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s AI generated or not.

People who complain about this, should build a product that will use AI to develop human taste. That’d be a better use of energy.

Contempt for art is what this is.

For example, Sure, you can make a craven facsimile of punk art for your poster. But that art style signals to punks that other punks are going to be there. You would never reproduce that style using traditional methods because you are not a member of that artistic tradition.

You should keep the originals. They signal to AI slopsters that this is a great place to meet other slopsters.

I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. The AI posters are just fine, perhaps even pretty good.

The problem is that using AI to create the posters show a lack of willingness to put in effort, and it makes you question whether the producer cares about the product and whether they care about the large scale societal problems related to the usage of post-2022 transformer based neural networks.

Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.

The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.

I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.

Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.

> The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.

But that's how the algorithm behind LLMs functions. It simply cannot create something unique by stepping out of its existing knowledge base. It has to refurbish existing data, because, well, that's all it has.

One might argue that a human artist also is refurbishing data, made out of experiences and knowledge it has gather throughout its life.

The difference I think comes from something extra (that we're entirely dumb-founded on) that the human mind can contemplate and extrapolate from, to be able to generate something truly unique and different.

I hope (and believe) this extra magical capacity is what will not allow AI (at least in its current statistical form) to be able to match us in terms of creativity & uniqueness.

I am impressed by the number of artists that follow HN even outnumbering programmers. Programmers are not artists, artists see the world in colors while we see it in black and white (just look at this page). There are a few really great artist/programmers among us but they're a very rare specimen

For us programmers, something maybe be good enough to use or bad enough to discard, while for an artist there are a thousand details to inspect by just glancing at it, typography, space, color, message, alignment, etc and many more I am not knowledgeable enough to list

To all artists, I admire you in a very different way, a kind of envy for not being able to see the beauty you can see in my bored green on black terminal world

Something horrible I've noticed with a lot of AI-generated design is the size of the typeface.

There's a menu for a place in my town and it's completely illegible. They printed the same thing in three sizes, and you need a magnifying glass to see the text on the smallest two.

Accessibility matters, and is part of the job of a designer. The problem with AI tools is that by skipping the expert, you risk making some horrible mistakes.

I agree that these examples are "better than the default" but still suffer from many AI-design bad smells. In terms of design, "style" (as in "Bauhaus" vs "Japanese" vs "Faux kid drawing") is less important than readability, economy and communication:

- The main issue with AI posters and flyers is almost uniform information density. They read as "too crowded". Posters should, like photographs or paintings, have a rhythm where some areas are high density and others act as negative space, and provide a more restful transition between information areas.

- The icons as bullet-points are a big AI cliche, and for the most part useless. Nobody needs an icon of a cupcake to understand what "cake" means and most of the other icons have no clear interpretation. Icons are only useful when, by themselves, communicate the idea (like the typical toilet icon). It's telling that every poster includes them.

- AI is not brave enough, or wise enough, to leave some blank space. Blank space is the #1 design resource.

- Font and visual style should not be arbitrary aesthetic choices, but rather motivated ones. They could relate to the event or the place through its history, culture, biome, or through the utopian vision of what the organizer is trying to bring to life. There should almost never be a legitimate choice between "Should we use Japanese, Punk or Kid-drawing style?"

- Being honest, earnest, truthful, is better than being cool.

- If a poster for an event calls your attention you can scan for the date, time and place. They will be there somewhere. But before you get there, there'll be important questions: "who organizes this?" "who is this for?" "what's the vibe going to be like?". Only a few of the posters try to partially provide this information through very small sentences (e.g., "A day of music, making and family fun")... but it's hardly enough. In my opinion this is what 80% of the time designing the poster should be spent on... looking nice and "professional" won't inspire trust or create commitment.

> "Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people."

I would also suggest the AI avoid trying to make realistic-looking musical instruments, because I've never seen an AI poster with a correct musical instrument. The uncanny-valley of an attempted instrument that has clear deformities hurts my brain and gives me the creeps. If you want a real instrument, just copy-and-paste a real instrument. Alternative maybe let the AI generate a cartoonish or clip-art-style musical instrument, so my brain isn't bothered by the disconnect between something that is trying to look real but isn't.

One trick that works from IRL is building a moodboard. Go to Pinterest, find what you like, paste it together.

If you're short on time, you can ask AI to summarize into a certain time and craft the prompt from there. But it's better to figure out what you really like.

ChatGPT tends to fall to the same things, but many of the other image generators do much better.

This is good to know, but the kind of folks who use AI to create their posters and menus aren't going to be able to be so specific. They'll throw the details at an LLM and take whatever they get the first time. What matters is they didn't have to pay a designer (they ignore that they're paying a subscription).

The comments seem to have the consensus that these designs are just "ok"

But to me it still seems genuinely amazing that LLM's are able to generate graphics of this high quality with the text and narrative correctly positioned.

Blown away, but also quite sad, about the future of creative endeavours like graphic design

I love how the AI silently injected "A day of fun for all the family" on the hand-drawn by a child design.

PS: Which then survives in the next iterations as "A day of music, making and family fun"

Edit: Ah just saw the call out on the previous iteration.

But still it's a nice display about the semantics encoded in the models.

Their very first attempt is arguably the best one there. I was surprised they didn't like it much and kept going. Then the "Stamp / Letterpress Style (Modernised)" was the only other good one.

So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.

I'm old enough to remember the Desktop Publishing revolution in the early 90s. There were so many awful posters, flyers and such that actual people made. My favorite was a preschool flyer where they used the kidnapper font.

Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.

I'm a big fan of FixIt Clinics, i.e. community repair workshops. Here's an example of one of their posters:

https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752

Here's what I like about it: it communicates. What, when, and where. And crucially, photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.

The author demonstrates that AI-generated posters can imitate many artistic styles besides the generic default, but these examples suffer the same problem as all template-based posters: they don't communicate what the event is actually like. What does a samba band performance look like? (There are drums, I guess?) What does a circus skills workshop look like? (There are juggling clubs, I guess?)

These posters may be more aesthetically pleasing but none of them make me interested in going to the event.

Word processors are designed to maximise readability, handling things like alignment and white space with zero effort from the user.

These posters don't have the feature of readability. They inconsistently apply the required design principles for this. Removing some of the clutter helps, but a WordArt poster from 1992 is still a better final product for the purpose.

Taking the last poster as an example (1940s cubist style), the graphic seems almost designed to draw your eye towards blank space. This, very precisely, detracts from the goal: the graphic is providing negative value!

Whereas, genuine 1940s cubist art exhibition posters are really astonishingly good at communicating the key information. As one example, https://artposterarchive.com/products/edward-wadsworth-vorti...

Small businesses torching years and years of propaganda and goodwill lavished on them, so they can save the $50 it would cost to have a human design a decent-looking poster.

One of the biggest problems is actually making sure the information needed is on the poster.

Times, dates, location, pricing, parking etc…

As he points out “it added a bunch of text…” now it’s one all the future designs. That’s great - is the text correct?

To be honest this was a problem before AI. People are not very good at communicating.

As a guy who used to do art direction and was a creative director i can with some confidence say that: “most “designs sucks balls” and 95% of the worlds population DO NOT CARE.

I wish it was different but estetics, color sensitivity and for a lack of better word “taste” is a skill that needs training - the kerning alone on those make me sad - but the dirty secret is that meticulous design and craft is a dying breed - why spend days on designing whitespace when you can get something the client likes in 10 minutes from a prompt?

For the type interested - get this: https://amzn.eu/d/09z7Mut8

It’s interesting, all these examples look exactly as what I remember a typical result at an intro graphics design would look like, in that the idea might be good, but it gets very sloppy (pun unintended) in the details, such as alignment, consistency – especially in the visual hierarchy –, or typography.

What’s also interesting to me is that requesting ”professional typography” did not fix the problem at all. And I would guess that there is a staggering amount of examples in the training data.

Maybe inference is just wobbly by nature? The same as text output has the characteristic randomness, even design output cannot resist being – for a lack of a better word – hand made?

"Me: a poster paint drawing by his young child."

Some time ago, I was in this apartment complex and there was a hand drawn sign of a dog pooping on the grass - the sign then said that residents should pick up after their dog. It looked like the locals living in the apartment complex had their child draw the dog pooping in a slightly adorable style. I remember feeling kind of happy about this, like I could see a kid sitting there with some crayons painting this dog. I know there were human artists perfecting this child like style before but still feels like some humanity is getting lost here making AI paint like a kid.

I grabbed an old Obon festival flyer from 2014 and told chatgtp to:

"look at this image and give me variants in the style of classical japanese artists and graphics designers (be sure to include hokusai and Ikko Tanaka). be sure to tell me about each style. upscale and include the original with some designer words that are plausible"

at least two of these don't look like AI to me and are perhaps better than the original. but a non-designer is likely to pick the more busy ones.

https://files.catbox.moe/5p5m9v.png

AI posters may or may not have to be horrible, but they absolutely must include [ icon | icon | icon | icon ], apparently

We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized. And on average that means it’s not better than what a qualified professional can produce, but it’s good enough, and good value for money. Just like IKEA furniture is not better than anything that a skilled carpenter can create, but most of us settle on industrialized furniture because we don’t have the budget for better, or we prefer to spend it elsewhere. Similarly, most companies don’t need bespoke posters nor software.

It's not that the first one is so awful in isolation, it's that they are everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.

I like the other posters more, but the first poster probably still conveys the idea of the event better: people having fun, drinking beer, with a live band. You don't get that from most of the other posters unless you first mentally transform those icons into real things, which takes effort.

I'm starting to think that icons are in fact the low-effort way to convey information. It's design you can just throw in anywhere without adapting it to context (except for maybe changing color).

If anything that shows that AI doesn't replace skilled people. It accelerates the production of these assets, still requires skill and knowledge to produce good results.

Up until recently, you'd pay someone else to create these. The organizer of an event or concert doesn't have the artistic talent to create these, nor skills in design/Photoshop apps.

Now the organizers of those events, understandaly, go to ChatGPT so they don't have to pay someone else, and this is the result.

That said it's likely for many the results are "good enough" and the designers job is effectively lost to AI. I doubt some random small event organizer sees the value in paying someone else to use AI to make them a slightly more original poster/flyer.

I'm not sure even over time we will see people appreciate the need for skill in using these tools because there will be more noob-friendly apps that do all the prompting for you. For example in this article it's clear one could make a "make a poster" app where you just click a few buttons to pick a style, and end up with more varied designs just like in the article, and with no need for another skilled person.

these are definitely better.

I really wonder what's going on in the minds of those who make the shitty AI posters? like, are they that unaware?

for me when I see them I just get instantly repulsed

> One note here is that along the way, the poster has acquired extra text (“A day of music making and family fun”) – it’s decided that Designers Republic would have thrown in some text of that kind, so it’s come up with some words. Those words are now in the chat context, so they appear in subsequent posters.

This is very important for programming and I don’t think enough people are cognizant of it

I'm reminded of how Mac apps are supposed to conform to common UI standards rather than going off and reinventing the wheel. Also the Bootstrap template for websites.

Similarly, it would be nice if there were common styles for posters that you could just use and an AI could generate and nobody would criticize you for. Not everything has to be an original design.

I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.

if NOT TRULY personal preference, then all those variations ARE horrible, but if they serve some taste--personal or marketing--then they are likely not to everyone's taste.

to me, they all look like lazy-prompting, which is the only way I ever do genAI imaging, because I fail to see why that "CPU" should be wasted on something I barely even care for.

That said ... let kids do that shit and pay them 50 or 100 bucks ...

The issue is that in my walled garden, I have not seen any of the good AI stuff. My wardens still use some home trained GPT 3.5 for most stuff, including their songs on potify and bootube. And i can't get access to current top level public AIs, either. Had the actual ChatGPT and Claude models for some while but I knew why ... otherwise I might put effort into semantics, syntax, grammar and my image generation prompts, which currently look like some MITM is speedrunning collages using haiku cowork and crayons or something ...

AI is a tool, just like photoshop was. Just because someone bought photoshop didn't mean that they can magically create amazing digital artwork, they had to learn photoshop and also be creative. Otherwise it would have been a horrible poster with comic sans. Same goes for AI, one has to learn to use the tool and be creative.

One thing you can do that never seems to occur to anyone is to tell the LLM to critique its own work. Then ask it how it would fix the issues it found, then feed that into the next iteration. You can also ask it to look for generative AI “tells” and do the same. One-shotting a prompt rarely gives you the best output.

Horrible is - not caring about what AI created, and just throwing it out there.

Not horrible is - caring about the outcome, and using AI to make it possible, irrespective of the skill level.

Horrible is - everyone trying to copy paste someone else’s work without caring.

I think, human thought + ai built is the “not horrible”, might even be awesome

What I find off-putting is the emoji style used. They look like images you'd find in a first grade workbook, or on sticker sheets handed out to first graders. I quit using emojis on my phone because of that "playmobil" look.

I suspect this trend started with the yellow happy face. Barf.

This has always been what irritated me about the AI poster style, is that I could tell that zero creativity or effort was involved. It is not that difficult to spend some time with an image generator to make something unique that even the staunchest AI art haters would probably not notice.

I think basically AI posters are bad because when given freedom to the model (which is what people will do when just asking "make me a poster for my coffee shop"), the model will always tend to do the same design style. So yes, as this article says, with better prompting you CAN get better results. The other problem I think is tool calling, because when prompted for a poster, ChatGPT will definitely use image generation, when it should be generating some html and css + some image assets and then presenting the user an image or pdf.

I think the tendency to go for image generation always might be related to token costs, designing with Code & adding some generated images to the mix should be more expensive than just image generation.

It used to be that all the available art generation systems would make mistakes on text, making the letters into weirdly shaped non-letter blobs and/or having strange typos all over the place (that were probably from getting the letter-shapes confused rather than not knowing how to spell words).

How exactly did that get fixed? It seems like suddenly they can consistently produce correct text with sharp borders, even with various "special effects" on the letters, as if they'd been actually graphic-designed in rather than "painted" with the same techniques as the rest of the image. Is there actually some kind of system that does tool calls and superimposes text on a base?

Is there an explanation for why AI images, or posters, look "AI"? What I mean is that even some of the better ones, that I quite like, have a distinct AI look that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Some elements are, the very saturated color or being overly busy, but not all images have these tells, and not all of them.

For a while I thought it was that sort of very subtle dithering/texture that a lot of the images have, but again not all of them.

Looking online, most seem to focus on things like the wrong number of fingers, things merging into one another, details that don't make sense, etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Does anyone have an explanation for why they are this easy to recognize as AI even when they are decent?

My hypothesis:

One way to bias the generative output away from ugly generic sloppy defaults and towards something you personally prefer and desire based on your taste ... is to show it examples of what good looks like to you.

It is very hard for us to describe in words why you like a certain thing. But you can spot it when you see it. Or you can describe some aspects of it that you like or dislike after you see it -- but not before.

This approach is more accessible to casual creators -- who do not have formal training and experience to say "use corporate memphis" or "punk fanzine look with grunge typography".

(and this can apply to many fields -- not just visual design)

This is barely prompting 101. Author is essentially saying "instead of asking it to just make a poster, ask it to make a poster in [aesthetic]."

This has nothing to do with design. Is bauhaus the best aesthetic choice for a spring fayre? Why or why not?

To be honest I’m surprised, I actually like them, even though they are obviously reductions to the average, bland repetitions of stuff that’s been done over and over again. That’s not necessarily a criticism, I know that’s what AI is and we should not expect more. And of course a small event with little budget does not need more than that (although of course you could think of something more unique if you wanted).

What scares me is what happens after we park on these ideas for years/decades because they are cheap and fast and just good enough. Will anyone take the time and effort to continue being creative?

I like his still of prompt creation "Give me a list of styles to choose from" then choosing one of the available options. SKILL.md files seem to be built upon assumptions of what the language model already knows and understands. Can it be that most skills are therefore tied to a particular LLM vendor/version combination ? The same prompt might be interpreted completely differently by a slightly different language model.

Here the author is asking the machine about what it knows, so there is less of an element of doubt.

I’ve been a designer (and developer) for 15+ years now. AI can produce better design than 80% of human designers already. Those we scream “AI can’t replace me” the loudest are those whom it already did.

This post showing that creativity will make you the winner in this AI era.

Now do this for science conference posters. There's something haphazard, unnerving, and uninformative about the AI-generated ones I am encountering increasingly. I imagine musicians feel similarly about AI-generated music and artists about AI-generated art because in all 3 cases, we're detail oriented.

For me it's about the unconventional analogies they try to express combined with their layout that even a couple crude 8.5x11 Excel plots and a poster author express better. And the human factor is an important component of poster sessions IMO.

I feel like ChatGPT Images 2.5 is another step up in terms of quality of designs. But it still needs to be told very specifically what to generate. A generic output is in turn due to a generic input.

Borrowed the same idea to create distinct video styles for videozero:

https://videozero.ai/styles/

Moral of the story - have taste.

Just like in engineering.

On design we have aesthetics but also legibility and usability.

For legibility: the first examples are bad because they fail to easily communicate what/when/where/details in a couple seconds, mainly because the profusion of visual clutter obfuscates the message. The latter examples fare much better on that regard.

Usability is a constraint maybe more applicable to websites like the discussion I saw the other day on the design of claude-written pages (all look the same, feels ok but good UX probably lacking).

While it’s interesting to see renderings in past styles graphic design, ultimately it’s going to ring false. Even if it’s executed well it’s just a costume or pastiche, with no real connection to the style.

What made these historical design movements actually memorable was usually a set of newly-possible techniques joined with young people with a set of shared community values.

So if you want to make something that will read as authentically “2026” to future generations, you should make brainrot. :-)

At some point the people criticizing ai art will realize it’s mostly a skills issue that they have the problem with. In the end, they have no issue with the concept itself. So many things that were blocked by people not having the ability to make simple posters or do other take they’re not familiar with are being unblocked. We should be empathetic to these people and not criticize them for using ai art for their garage sale.

Going to these events sounds like too much work. Couldn't AI just give me a summary of the event? It could even play some AI music similar the band that performed.

This is misunderstanding the problem really. People don't hate ai posters because they are bad, they are technically better than many normal posters. They hate ai posters because they hate ai generated work and desire to just be done with the whole thing.

By that logic they hate this even more because now its harder to tell its ai. This is really a person hating the means but using the ends to justify it rather than stating so outright

This is a bit like telling the owner of a tiki bar that they don't need to use the Papyrus font, or a kindergarten that they don't need to use MS Comic Sans. The default style exists because AI-naive people with unsophisticated tastes find it amazing. If you give them prompts for different styles, you at best just trade one devil for another, similarly to how everyone started prompting for "studio Ghibli".

For me the tell for AI-generated-anything is too much detail

Like, it just throws everything in there, because it doesn't have the same friction that humans do.

All posters I saw used to look like these sub-10-dollar stuff before AI took over: https://graphicriver.net/posters-graphics?sort=trending#cont...

They were/are not great. While I agree that spending extra 10 minutes improves the results, AI stuff are also not amazing. I think there's nothing surprising about this.

This is the classic client vs designer disparity.

Here, client makes it with AI vs designer making it with AI.

The client doesn't really know what they want, or how to ask it properly. The designer is the one with taste, and the client pays for that.

Designers find flaws in the AI outputs, because their taste is high and prefer to just make it themselves.

(Not even touching on the hornet's nest of ethics of how these models are trained)

The top ones which are all the same are better than any that which follow. To my eye.

Guess it’s subjective. I’m looking for fair info. He is looking for design uniqueness.

At least the AI generated posters are better than human-generated t-shirt designs, where you find generic texts such as: "Est. 1984" (or any random year), "I [heart] NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", "Original Trademark", "Authentic Denim Brand", etc., etc.

I don't often say this but those jobs are ripe for replacement by AI. It won't do worse!

That default style is very recognizable. I am seeing it everywhere.

I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.

I love this posting. Taste is something that needs to be worked for. It doesn’t matter how well the tool renders the output if the tool user has not taste (me included).

In the future I think that users will learn more, and tools will get better. The true tell of AI usage will be that a small organization will have a beautiful poster. That was never possible in the past.

Nothing in that article isn’t horrible to my eyes.

AI-generated style right now has a what I'd call a grotesque aesthetic. Its offputting and immediately recognizable. The biggest offender being the rounded fonts and "wrong" smiles. Its probably going to get better but until it does I will feel free to ignore it same way as highway commercials.

You need AI for this?

Go to Pinterest, search "poster", find some cool ideas, steal it and do it in Inkscape in 30 minutes.

Has the world gone crazy?

That post was written by a designer judging designs.

His attention is biased by the practice of seeing and understanding dozens of visual languages. But he doesn't understand that, unlike a painting, a poster isn't the purpose, the end. A painting in a museum exists for itself. A poster in a street exists at the service of a commercial message. The poster isn't the focus or the point, the message is.

He looks for visual languages, but most people would look just for information: what, who, where, when, why. If they need to spend more than a tenth of a second to decode the visual language of a poster then the poster failed.

There is a famous book on UI design whose title defines very well the design principle for things that should face the masses: "Don't make me think".

As a designer, the post author seeks the unexpected. Normal people just overlook and avoid it.

Normal people love the bland and repetitive precisely because it is familiar. That's the reason there are so many more McDonald's and similar franchise chains than fine French/Italian bistros and unique shops. That's why people listen to dumb pop and country music but not Stravinsky. That's why so many people watch Hallmark movies. People choose boredom because that's something they can easily understand.

Peopel are dumb, they don't want to think.

The irony is that the less appealing posters would take a human artist much more skill and time to create.

Humans actually prefer minimalist designs with basic flat shapes with flat colors which ironically is trivial to create and can be done without AI or talent. Most people can’t even create anything remotely close to the less appealing posters by hand.

Beyond quantity by itself and the ethics, one of the problems of AI art is the sameness of the production (style, color, etc) and a contradiction between the amount of details, the style and the errors in the illustration that makes it goes into the uncanny valley territory.

I did the same experiment, only with architecture diagrams. Was pleasantly surprised at the results and the variations: https://robotpaper.ai/generating-weird-beautiful-architectur...

Well, they're superficially less same-y, but none of them are really giving spring fair vibes.

Except for the "professional graphic designer has added typography to a poster paint drawing by his young child" one, I'd go as far to say that I actually like it, especially if you were to remake it with the assistance of an actual child.

The same applies to "vibe-coded" software btw: You can give the agent style suggestions on how to design the UI - you don't have to end up with the standard "flat/pseudo-material/2020s SV startup" (or alternatively "cyberpunk-ish dark mode") look if you don't want to.

The very end of the article hit on the best point.

If you ask AI to use HTML to create an 8.5x11 designed "poster" or "one sheet" it can do a great job that is indistinguishable from what anyone/artist can do in HTML/CSS.

But, fine-tuning is still required - like ask it to use less used fonts and less gradients :)

I am tired of seeing AI fliers everywhere

Ive been getting AI political ads. I mean political ads are already shitty enough but now I'm seeing "<incumbent> is a wolf in sheep's clothing " with an Ai image of him wearing a sheep suit. It's true and kinda funny because he is indeed a piece of shit but cmon put some effort!

Once you realize that LLMs are great at style transfer a lot of things start to make sense and a lot of avenues open up for you.

Also the "horrible" style is not because of AI it's because of what it's trained on. If anything its an indictment of the average designer not AI.

It's the typography. I'm yet to see a single AI generated thing where the typography is not distorted. The examples generated are no exception, everything is just a bit off.

It's not horrible, no: it's off enough to make one feel uneasy looking at it without being able to pinpoint the problem.

Similar to Canva trend, where everything is streamlined. Same models similar output is hunting us for sure. But most of these restaurants, or festivals already have somewhat of a distinguishable brand? Seems like a quick fix if someone is slightly engaged in the creation.

In Gemini, which is quite good at image generation, it gets locked into a path so rigidly that you need to start a new chat to get much variation in style; about half the time when using a previous image (in the same chat) as input it just reproduces it exactly.

The icon list in every poster, no matter which style (even the minimalists) is what's killing me.

I've been trying to help someone create publicity images (who can't afford to pay a designer). The biggest problem with AI is modification of input photos. The results are good, but still trying to get it to not "sloppify" the images.

I've seen this trend in India very much . Every new poster every new shop banner or heck even the new led signs are all that red and yellow lazy chat gpt design. People can spend extra two to three minutes to get a proper one.

I like this post. And the comments even more. I've rarely seen such a breath of opinions and analysis on HN. And it's all from a straightforward use case and a few examples. Is it HN tailored clickbaiting? If it is, it is the right kind.

Some of these are actually... pretty good. I used to do print design to pay my way through college, and they wouldn't be too far from run-of-the-mill pamphlets we would turn around (both design and print in small runs) over lunch.

> Inspired by this blog post, I went on to make a catalogue of one hundred poster styles, with ready-to-paste prompts and example images for each one.

This is really cool! I don’t ever make posters - but I can imagine these being super useful

The most glaring weakness in AI poster design to me is its inability to create strong visual hierarchy. Even if you explicitly ask it to do so, its fundamental inability to “see” is quite apparent in the output.

AI-generated posters only look horrible when lazy prompts force the tech to guess, but with the right human direction, strict styling limits, and clean layouts, they can be genuinely striking.

A lot of the AI generated posters are just too crowded. I think part of the beauty of the "old fashioned way" is that time and budget constraints forced you to prioritize what was important.

AI image generators are really bad at making posters and even worse with small tweaks.

I gave up on AI images and moved to having my agent generate html, rendering it, and then taking a snapshot in the needed size.

The problem is when the ai has control over the finished product. I prefer to use the ai to create a poster in a 3rd party software like LaTeX, so I can make the final edits

Remember back in the day when people used to insult human-made art by saying it was "derivative"? Yeah, this isn't an AI era phenomenon. I think some of these posters are good.

Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!

They do, the very fact of using such posters indicates the lack of necessary competence and or resources in the process that can discern quality to fix the results

If you want me to read it, if you want me to attend or buy it, maybe just spend the hour to make the actual poster.

Even amateur work is more appealing than the AI poster look.

But if a designer improves an AI design and I feel it's fine, does that make me strange? If you ran a blind test on this, I think it would come out with high preference...

Would be interesting to see if it could use CSS Zen Garden to build the posters.

https://www.csszengarden.com

That first poster example is exactly how every poster at my kids school looks. If theres ever any carton people they have extra fingers or are reading books backwards.

Sure, you can get any style you like, but /you will pull those little icons lining the list of activities at your county fair from my cold robotic hands/

It is kind of sad that whenever you see art now, whether it's good or "bad", it's uncertain if the artist actually made it, or just prompted AI.

Is there a way to formalize the space of all possible aesthetics a model knows, in a way that you could randomly sample from it?

The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.

Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very low dimension manifold, and there's even a computable metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.

Are there more general versions of this? Like: "Here's a list of every human art in history: infer a coordinate system that uniformly metricizes every art that can ever exist?"

It all reminds me of when Amazon website used to get laughed at but those who overweighted their design preferences. The first ai poster in the list look fine to me

I get your point, but it still takes away from real human designers and takes the creativity of real art, even if it's just a poster, away.

I think the "avoid people" part does a lot of work. For a lack of a better word, AI generated people still look soulless.

Indeed, the most important function of a designer, tailor, decorator etc. is filling the weaknesses in the client's request with actually good taste.

At some point during this progression, the poster lost most of the “AI-ness” and I didn’t get such a visceral reaction to it. Cool!

Most AI-generated art is "good enough" for most one-shot designs by now (though still not [always] as good as a good meat-based artist of course)

The problems right now are:

- Maintaining a consistent and coherent style/aesthetic when you have to generate lots of assets for something. For example sprites in a video game.

- Iterating over a design for more than a few passes. For some reason most models keep degrading the entire image if you keep asking for edits to a specific part of the image. Or, some problems are or become impossible for them to fix no matter how you prompt them.

Adding a safety pin to the punk design was too much of a cliché.

I wasn't a fan of the Memphis one as it reminds me of the worst eighties and nineties designs.

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing it

The point really isn't just the use of technology. People don't complain when a hand drawn poster is photocopied! The issue is that it's taken a human out of the creative process _and_ it's using the plagiarism machine that is also making everything worse while enriching a handful of the worst people. It's a sign of how lazy the event organizer is, and how little they care about people, which is especially foolish for an event where you would like "people" to show up.

From a creative direction perspective, I think this is missing a major part of the story and what's driving much of the slopsign aesthetic.

Your prompts and turns help with the graphic design portion of a poster. But, if you're a restaurant owner, you're doing both the graphic design and the food photography in GenAI, which further compounds the signals of slop that can seem unsettling to someone viewing it.

The former is much more tunable than the latter, but the end diagnosis remains: if you can't tell what's bad in a design, you won't be able to tell what's good, and no amount of turns will iterate towards it. This is one layer above your scope. Art direction encompasses both, because there's a relationship between media and graphic design, especially when you have products to show.

So garbage is greater than total garbage? Let me go back to the saying that somewhat right is still wrong.

That icon+text row is the tell for me too, though I'd blame the prompt more than the model, nobody ever asks for an awkward layout.

Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.

Good "taste" and knowing what you want (and don't want), seem to once again be the trick to success with LLMs.

This is quite sad - there is some simple text, and icons - sure ai saves some time… but honestly, text and a few pics?

This isn’t a web UI, it doesn’t need icons.

But more importantly, if you aren’t the kind of person who could make a halfway decent text only poster before, you are going to make the posters at the top of the article. Those are objectively harder to read than something typed up in word.

You aren’t going to know to tell the AI to “ Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.”

Why do the ChatGPT posters always have a lot of dividers? No matter how you change the style, it's always there.

For your basic words-and-dates-with-shapes-and-shit posters, the AI ones are annoying, but I’m not gonna die on a hill over it. The hill I _will_ die on is restaurants using AI generated images of food. No. That needs to be illegal. I thought it _was_ illegal.

This article is doing the whole concept a disservice. It's still just randomly generating without thought; albeit maybe with a drop more taste than usual. (not a significant amount of taste, just a single drop).

The problem with a lot of AI is that the baseline is already past "good enough" for many folks.

But you can also imagine a very different approach:

Imagine if you start with a vision, and just happen to use AI tools as part of your process to realize that vision, just-like/along-with many other implements. I've seen examples where people put together many layers in photoshop or gimp, and mix with rendering, hand drawn art, photographs, etc. Very much like how some of the better programmers work with AI assist.

This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen, and that's the way people should work with AI. A brainstorming session, with background and references, with broad knowledge of the field, then with clear instructions on how to proceed, different designs, propositions out of the ordinary, etc

I've been doing that for the last six months and the results are more than spectacular for the apps I build

So no, 'create an inventory app' is not enough, you have to be specific in every sense, every detail of the tech stack, phases, checklists, roadmaps, decisions, everything that makes AI's life easier (less mistakes to make and fix) and yours too.

Next time, start with "Let's have a brainstorming session about an [inventory] app we will create and at the end write a very detailed prompt.md, here is the initial context... ask all the questions you may have before writing any code"

* Replace [inventory] with any other app you may need

And remember one thing, AI is a multiplier of both our intelligence and our stupidity, the outcome will reflect that

Edit: The link at the end deserves some exposure, it's the work of the author showcasing 100 prompts for different designs [1] and some people won't get there because tl;dr or short attention span. Get them, use them, learn from them

[1] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts

I did not expect to see a Leamington Spa beer fest poster being used as a reference image today.

For anyone here who works at Anthropic or OpenAI, this is the doing of your lovely CEOs and their constant fear-mongering that has turned an entire population of people against anything even remotely touching AI.

Community flyers have been notoriously cringe for a very long time. In the 1990s they were all Comic Sans with cringe Microsoft Word clipart. Then, the design world decided that Comic Sans was the bar for bad taste.

Even if these examples look lazy, someone still had to do the work to prompt the thing into existence and they, at the very least, found it acceptable. So, either way, it had the same amount of effort it always had.

Have the AI drive the tool, not direct generation, is what I've found works best.

Thank you! These are so nice compared to the 1000 times repeated AI graphic I see everywhere.

Yeah, and adding an explicit "no sakura, no rising sun" list does half the work.

Man, I must be so basic when it comes to such designs. They all looked fine to me lol.

It did pretty great on the 90s drum-and-bass party version at the end, takes me back! :)

People dont want to write multiple prompts or write a lengthy one. They want to say create poster x for event y. That's it, that's what they get and that's what they take.

They may not have to be horrible, but they DO have to be beige... apparently?

It's interesting how the negative examples all look like mobile game ads.

Which isn't an accident - mobile game ads are tuned studiously on consumers actual preferences and not the preferences of designers. i.e. the people that are likely to spend actual money on the product/service being advertised to prefer the ad being portrayed here as bad.

Bluntly, being able to sidestep the whims and fashions of graphic designers is proving to be a major feature of the AI revolution.

The second options seem very similar to the popular templates in canvas.

What is the new phrase? The moat was always ‘taste’, or something?

AI is killing designers, and this guy just delivered the final blow.

Can you tell your AI to not apply piss filter to everything?

Like HDR photos of the mid-2000s, these too shall pass.

All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.

Early dnb gig flyer gave me rave days nostalgia

It's almost like you'll get much better AI generated posters if you're experienced at graphic design and know exactly what you want to create given what the client that is paying you for might want.

Interesting...

(A lot of people end up using Canva for this kind of stuff, btw)

The city where I work recently put up a bunch of terrible AI slop posters on electrical boxes, etc.

Reflecting on why I find them so offensive, I think it's because they all have this bubbly look of "low effort maximalism" where everything has an unnecessary amount of detail, which tends to make them visually overwhelming to look at.

I still have oppositions to AI art on moral grounds, and I doubt I'd ever hang a poster that I knew was AI-generated on my wall, but to give the author of this post some credit, I would be way less offended if the AI art that my city generated looked like any of the examples on this page.

just spend hours tweaking the prompt and it will look like you spent hours making the poster. Isn't AI great

Perhaps... but is this all you found once you made it into the Ministry of Information? Perhaps this was a sort of Information Retrieval all its own?

Some people only have taste in their mouth

As usual, AI is a tool and will be good in the hands of the wielder. I've been saying this since Stable Diffusion released nearly half a decade ago.

Ironically the author isn't immune from publishing slop themselves. https://john.hartnup.uk/backpressure/

> They’re OK

They are not OK.

Pay. An. Artist.

These models are built on IP theft from artists who are now losing work to this slop. Even if you don't see the difference (rest assured, most of your audience will), the morality of it is terrible.

I don't hate AI art because it's bad, but because it signals a really specific amount of low effort. If a company wants to signal to me "I am doing just enough to get your attention" then don't blame me when you don't.

It's like dating someone who only uses a perfume/cologne but they do so because they don't want to take a bath. You could have done BOTH but you opted to do just enough to not make me not want to hold my breath.

So, I think this article is circling something a lot more foundational when it comes to people’s disdain for AI. If you put more thought, more effort, and more originality into your work, you get something that starts to feel like an actual artistic expression. If you just type in a basic prompt and accept whatever comes back, that shows too. And I think that is a large part of why people feel insulted by this stuff in the first place.

It’s hard to respect a piece of work or take it seriously when it feels like the person who made it didn’t think it was worth giving much consideration. You’re asking someone to stop, look, and care about your poster and whatever it represents, but you haven’t given them much reason to believe you cared about it yourself. If you can’t take it seriously, how should we? It isn’t really about whether it took five minutes. It’s about whether there was any thought behind those five minutes.

So, I read this article as if it had the following title: “If you insist on using an LLM to generate visuals, you still have to put some thought into them.” But then, that starts to defeat the point for anyone who was using an LLM to avoid that effort in the first place, doesn’t it? You can make the process easier, but you can’t just assume that having produced something means you’ve made something worth sharing.

At the end of the day, I think there are valid uses for LLMs and there are uses that don’t add much of anything. As a consumer of content, the ones I respond to tend to be the ones where the LLM’s involvement isn’t the most obvious thing about the work. I want to see the person’s idea come through. A very light touch, not a deluge. This can absolutely apply to creating visuals, but it requires judgment, revision, and a willingness to do more than accept the first thing you’re given.

And it seems like a lot of people aren’t willing to put in that effort. That’s fine. Their work will continue to be distinguished by that lack of care, while people who are willing to put more into it will stand out. The initial novelty only carries something so far. Once you start picking up on the familiar patterns, that sense of something being slightly off becomes hard to ignore.

So, moving forward, I’m not so sure human creativity and input are things that can simply be outdone and made irrelevant. Maybe they’re an additional layer that keeps giving us somewhere further to go. An LLM can imitate what people have already brought to the table, but given access to that same LLM, we can bring our own experiences, ideas, and judgment into the mix. The tool gives us a starting point. I don’t see why we should assume it also determines how far we can take it.

If it's a craft festival, you should pay one of the crafts people to craft a poster. Any stench of AI (and in particular, the weirdness of an AI generated punk-ish poster) for a craft event makes me think it's a scam because I know for sure they had contacts of people that could've done a better job, and been supported while doing it... which is the moral pitch of the event. Even if the craft was basketmaking or something totally non-poster-related, use a close-cropped photo of a basket as the background or something. You've got artistic people around you. The outcome is going to be better, universally. (I don't really want to debate this honestly. We can agree to disagree if you think this isn't universally applicable.)

But I'm fine with the beer festival phoning it in. I guess my only issue with the in-the-wild poster example you found is it does look... bland and just aestetically bad. Your example AI poster styles would be a huge improvement! I can't say they're like, impressive in anyway or winning any awards since they're also bland, but aestetically they hold up and IMO, actually communicate the info better than the ez-slop original.

Maybe to put it another way: if it was 2015, and an craft festival and a beer festival both used the same incredibly lame looking Word template for posters, I'd have the exact same opinion.

I’m convinced that almost nobody that is saying to hire cheap designers instead of AI has actually done so.

Think of the absolute worst, dogshit offshore developer contractors you have worked with. It’s the same thing for design. In the 1% chance they can even understand what you want them to do, you then have a 1% chance that they are capable of executing it in a barely satisfactory way.

If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. Some might call this technology, drawing.

Not a great sentence.

Prompting is an art

interesting to see a prompt post getting so upvoted

I've been telling people to be thankful the posts are blatantly AI.

Soon enough it will be harder and harder to tell, and all their feedback is being scraped to improve the next model.

This already demonstrates 2-3 extra sentences of prompting and you get a completely different style that is harder to call out.

This is one example of how knowledge is still useful, even in the world of AI. If you know about different art movements, aesthetics, etc. you can prompt images using them, and make stuff that doesn't look like the generic slop that uses that recognizable round-corners style.

My eyes immediately move away from AI generated graphics. If it does manage to fool me, I get irritated and the thing you are trying to promote gets associated with that feeling. Make a poster with crayons if you will, but spare us from more cognitive polution.

those actually don't look half bad

so who is going to the spring fayre?

the biggest issue is NO WHITE SPACE.

bunch of haters in these comments.

Slop is slop because people put in zero effort so the LLM just produces the first thing it was trained to do. You can absolutely get good results out of AI but it takes taste and a little work.

> Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.

This seems to be the crux of the issue. It's not that the AI posters were bad, but has all the hallmarks of low effort. And if the organizer can't be arsed to put effort in their poster, why should anyone think it will be an event worth attending? The quoted prompt is not something someone can think of off the cuff. It requires someone who have seen enough posters to know what they would like and what not to put in. That takes effort. It's called AI slop not because it looks bad (though I do think it is), but no effort is put into them.

AI posters is like using the Papyrus font.

Just hire a dang artist or (gasp) take a few hours to learn to make something.

There's no ethical way to use AI art, it's all based on theft.

the ones in the article that aren't complete eyesores are just what you get out of Canva with no changes except busier (which, by the way, is worse)

this is dumb as hell. Instead of feeding it through an LLM just make it plain text comic sans and it'll be better. Word clipart looks more palatable than this

Only the last poster kind of gave me vibes, the other ones are absolutely soulless and slop.

I guess it works for the target audience.

This is hilarious.. The bad examples are ai slop. The final "good" one they make is corpo slop, lol!

So AI slop is in reality prompt slop

> They’re OK

No, they aren't.

These are still terrible. It's painfully obvious they are AI. And that's the whole problem. AI posters feel soulless and like nobody put in the work to make something nice. I mourn our pre-AI world with its showcases of human creativity.

Beautiful. Now this is how to work with an LLM, not castigate it.

The beige / slightly faded Claude design trend is atrocious.

once again judgment comes into play.

judgement + taste is the difference maker.

Please stop.

I would argue that “AI-generated” posters are, by definition, horrible. They can’t not be horrible because of the very nature of how they're made.

Julio

They just need to not exist

HN may as well be /r/accelerate

The AI obsession is ruining every conversation.

Simply, don't use AI to generate posters and pay someone to do it.

AI posters are not horrible, they just expose the person who "commissioned" them as trash. In a way, that is a good thing, since you can avoid them more easily.